Replatforming a Website Is Two Purchases, Not One — and the Catalogue Prices Both

A subscription that quietly became a decision

The situation is common enough to be a genre: a site built on Tilda, Wix or an ageing WordPress install, a monthly fee that keeps arriving, a feature ceiling that keeps getting closer. In the VIT MARKET catalogue — the services arm of the VITON13 platform, 100 listings with published price bands — the exit from that situation is priced in three separate rows. Two of them are engineering. The third is insurance. Reading them side by side gives the clearest picture of what replatforming actually costs that this catalogue can offer.

A disclosure before the numbers: VIT MARKET is VITON13's own storefront and VJOURNAL is VITON13's newsroom, which is exactly why nothing below is asserted from memory. Every figure is computed from the bands the catalogue publishes — a midpoint here always means the floor plus the ceiling divided by two — and every claim about what a service includes is taken from its own listing text. Where a sentence is our reading rather than the data's, it says so.

Two engineering exits, one price step apart

The builder exit comes first. "Leaving Tilda/Wix for your own code" is listed at $500 to $1,500 and 15 to 30 hours of work, which puts its midpoint at exactly $1,000 — precisely the median midpoint of the whole 25-row web-development group. As an offer it is almost aggressively plain: the same site, rebuilt as code the owner controls, with the builder's monthly subscription and its feature ceiling removed.

The WordPress exit costs nearly twice as much. "Moving from WordPress to a static site without losing SEO" is listed at $800 to $3,000 and 20 to 40 hours; its $1,900 midpoint is 1.9 times the builder exit and sits in the top quartile of its group. Both rows share the catalogue's Migrations category, whose median midpoint across its two rows is $1,450. The premium is not for more pages — it pays for the promise in the listing itself, that URLs and redirects are carried over one to one and search positions survive the move.

The third row is not engineering at all

The catalogue's SEO group holds the third exit row, and it writes the largest number of the three. "Site migration without losing traffic" is listed at $700 to $3,000, a $1,850 midpoint — the most expensive row of the 25 in its group by that measure. Its delivery estimate is the tell: 2 to 5 days of preparation plus a month of support, one of 16 listings in that group whose duration carries a condition after the headline figure.

What it sells is not the move but the survival of the move: URL mapping, redirects placed and verified, and monitoring set up so that, in the listing's words, any losses are visible on the first day rather than a quarter later. If the two engineering rows are the removal van, this row is the insurance policy that rides along.

The full bill, computed

Put the pieces together and the shape of a replatforming budget appears. A builder exit with traffic insurance spans a combined floor of $1,200, a combined midpoint of $2,850 and a combined ceiling of $4,500. A WordPress exit with the same insurance runs $1,500 at the floor, $3,750 at the midpoint and $6,000 at the ceiling. Each of those six figures is the simple sum of two published bands, nothing more.

One comparison inside that arithmetic deserves its own sentence: the insurance midpoint, $1,850, is higher than the builder-exit midpoint of $1,000. In this catalogue, protecting the traffic through a move is priced above the smaller move itself. The durations, by contrast, refuse to be added — the engineering rows quote hours, as all 25 web-development listings do, while the insurance row quotes days plus a month of support, and no honest arithmetic merges those units.

Who can skip the insurance

What follows is VJOURNAL's decision logic, not the catalogue's. A site with no meaningful search traffic — a new project, a landing page fed by ads, a card site that exists to hold a phone number — has nothing for the insurance row to protect. For that buyer the engineering row alone is the rational purchase, and the builder exit at a $1,000 midpoint is the whole bill.

The calculus flips the moment organic search earns revenue. Then the SEO row is not an add-on but the larger stake, and the pricing above suggests the market weighs it accordingly. One caution for the middle case: the WordPress-exit listing already claims positions are preserved, which overlaps the insurance row's promise. A buyer quoting both should ask which redirect and monitoring work sits in which quote — paying twice for one redirect map is the avoidable mistake here.

The price of skipping it

The catalogue also prices the counterfactual, which is rare luck for an analysis like this. "Traffic-drop investigation and recovery plan" is listed at $500 to $2,500 — a $1,500 midpoint — with a delivery estimate of 1 to 3 days for diagnosis and recovery work billed separately. That last clause is the expensive part: the band covers finding out what went wrong, not putting it right.

Read against the insurance row, the asymmetry is stark. Prevention has a midpoint of $1,850, all-in by its own description. Diagnosis alone after a bad move carries a midpoint of $1,500, with the repair bill unpriced and unbounded on top. Nothing in the data says how often the bad case happens — but the catalogue's own price structure says that when it does, the meter starts near where the insurance would have stopped.

What these numbers cannot tell you

The limits first: these are published asking bands, not invoices. The dataset contains no record of what any migration actually cost, how long one actually took, or how often an unprotected move actually loses traffic — so nothing above can be read as an outcome statistic. The builder-exit listing's claim that subscription savings repay the work within 6 to 12 months is the seller's arithmetic, not ours; it depends on a plan fee the catalogue does not publish.

The unit gap matters too. Hour-quoted engineering and day-quoted support cannot be converted into each other without a declared constant, and this article deliberately avoids doing so. And the category labels — Migrations in the web group, Migration in the SEO group — are the catalogue's own tags, not an independent taxonomy. What survives all these caveats is relative structure: two engineering prices one step apart, and an insurance product priced above the smaller of them.

Three questions before you sign

A replatforming quote is easier to read once you know the bill comes in two parts. First: which part is this quote for — the code move, the traffic protection, or genuinely both? Second: who produces and who verifies the redirect map, since both the WordPress exit and the insurance row claim that work? Third: what monitoring exists on day one, because the insurance row's whole premise is that a loss seen immediately is recoverable while a loss seen in a quarter is a forensic case.

The catalogue's answer to the headline question is unusually legible. Leaving a builder is a four-figure decision at the midpoint — $1,000 for the move, $2,850 with protection — and leaving WordPress is the same decision with roughly double the move and the same insurance premium. Whether that is expensive depends on what the subscription and the feature ceiling were costing you, and that number was never the catalogue's to publish.

Decision framework: website replatforming cost

Replatforming is two purchases: moving the product and protecting its demand. Code, content, analytics, redirects, search signals and team workflows must survive the move together.

Digital acquisition guidance recommends iterative delivery, an owned backlog and technical review of code repositories. A quote that prices only page rebuilding leaves migration risk outside the bill.

Require separate acceptance criteria for content inventory, redirect mapping, analytics parity, performance, accessibility, rollback and post-launch monitoring before comparing migration prices.